​I’m sure everyone reading this is familiar with the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas. I’ve never been to it, or thought much about it, but I knew that it was a vaguely Atlantis-themed waterpark and hotel with rides and attractions decorated in ersatz ancient motifs. What I did not know is that the resort apparently promotes bizarre pseudoscience and fringe history rather than just treating Atlantis as a fantasy like Disney World or the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. According to an article published yesterday in The Australian, the staff at Atlantis indoctrinate visitors in some of the very worst fringe history claims about the lost continent.

​At one point, reporter and author Tony Perrottet reports that a guide informed him and his son that “Atlantis was a highly civilised place with technology that often exceeded our own.” Later, they see an Egyptian-style “Power Tower” whereby the resort claims that the people of Atlantis generated electricity. At dinner, a waiter told them, after the claims of Edgar Cayce, that “Of course the Bahamas were part of Atlantis.” It is never entirely clear how much the visitor is meant to take seriously and how much is supposed to be an embrace of the fantasy—like when Disney World pretends that the costumed characters really are the people and animals they portray. Perrottet, though, leaves the impression that the resort would prefer that visitors embrace a specific science fiction version of Atlantis—one he says was culled from 1961’s Atlantis: The Lost Continent, though I’m sure there is at least a little bit of Undersea Kingdom in there, too. (The resort features the faux-wreckage of a whale-shaped submarine modeled on the one from the 1961 movie.)

I was struck, however, by Perrottet’s evaluation of how the Atlantis resort embraces a very different version of Atlantis from the Victorian and midcentury versions. Those versions of Atlantis emphasized the continent’s white master race and made it the wellspring of a decidedly Eurocentric global civilization, a precursor of the Euro-American world order. By contrast, the new Atlantis, created in the 1980s, is much more diverse:

Its cheery embrace of multicultural history — tossing Mexican, European and Middle Eastern imagery into a colourful brew — matches the cosmopolitan make-up of its guests. In Plato’s [the resort’s bar], the air echoes with conversations in Spanish, Japanese and Hindi. The philosopher would have been proud; this Atlantis is a celebration of global culture, with everyone united in the pursuit of sunshine and fun.

It’s interesting to see Atlantis transformed from a symbol of imperial power and colonialism, as Ignatius Donnelly had presented it, to one of multiculturalism and globalization.

As we head into this weekend, I want to let you know about my plans to change my blog publishing schedule. I’ve been writing this blog for nearly seven years, and for most of that time I have produced a new post seven days per week, 365 days per year. That amount of writing is not sustainable, especially without pay, and with the downtick in fringe history material being published—and the severe amount of repetition in that which is released. Case in point: Friday night the History Channel launched Ancient Aliens: Declassified, which was nothing but old episodes of the show repackaged with a few deleted scenes and extra commentary. What’s the point of bothering to say anything about that?

Anyway, I am finding that it takes far too long to hunt down and develop a blog post every single day, and I do not have the kind of time needed to sustain that type of schedule. I’ve found that it takes too much time away from my actual paying work, not to mention other projects I would like to devote time to. I had thought about writing shorter posts, but that wouldn’t fix the problem of finding topics. I’ve experimented with other formats to cut back a bit in the past—rerun posts, posts pointing toward others’ excellent content, excepts from historic sources—but it keeps coming back to taking a lot of time to find and prepare content.

So, for a variety of reasons, including my own need for more personal time, I am going to be cutting back my blog from seven days per week to five. Because Ancient Aliens runs on Fridays, necessitating a Saturday (or late Friday—depending on how ambitious I am) blog post to cover new episodes, I am tentatively planning to schedule new posts to run Tuesday-Saturday, to be adjusted as needed.

Of course, I will update my blog as needed if something really important happens, but it’s been a long time since anything really important happened that set the whole world abuzz.

It was not my original intention to write a blog every single day, but I ended up doing it for a long time because there was so much to write about, and between 2010 and, say, 2015, it was pretty easy. With the glut of fringe history TV shows in that era, about a third of my blog posts simply reviewed and critiqued their claims, and I could spin off interesting sidelights into follow-ups. But most of those shows are dead, with the exception of Ancient Aliens, and cable has gone whole hog in paranormal dimensions that are beyond my expertise, particularly in hunting monsters like Bigfoot. That has cut out a lot of the essentially free content I could toss off in a show’s running time. Recent cable programs just haven’t been as compelling. Last weekend, for example, the History Channel devoted a couple of hours to the search for Jesus’ DNA in The Jesus Strand: A Search for DNA. What would one even say to that? The absurdity of the premise refutes itself. Even if one were to recover DNA from a stain or a hair on an object tradition associated with Jesus, how would anyone prove it came from the Biblical Jesus (historical, literary, or otherwise), much less, as the show grandiosely claimed, use it to locate the modern descendants of Jesus? Just playing the odds, they’d more likely accidentally find the descendants of some anonymous monk who had possession of the object in Middle Ages.

I hope that cutting back to five days a week won’t cause too much consternation. This blog post was written in advanced to run today. Tomorrow will be my first day off, and I will have something new on Tuesday.

The idea of Atlantis as a symbol of multiculturalism is not new. Ignatius Donnelly e.g. thought that various races came from Atlantis. So, not only one race, but various races.

In the Renaissance and Baroque times, many scholars developed similar ideas that all cultures were rooted in Atlantis which made all cultures on earth equal, in a certain sense. Sigüenza even used this argument to defend the American indians against exploitation.

But of course, all this is far away from Plato's intentions.

For Plato, Atlantis was a great country which became decadent over time and started war - and failed exactly because of its decadence. (And also this was not a new story, and Plato indeed knew several examples for such events from history, so there is really the question why on earth he should have felt to invent just another example and to tell everybody that his invention was true?)

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Americanegro

4/23/2017 03:47:05 pm

This is what everyone gets wrong. Plato doesn't say it was true. His tale of Atlantis is explicitly a "what if".

We have to make a difference between the historical tradition from Egypt and what Plato made of it. Concerning the historical tradition, Plato clearly says that is is true. (What is not necessarily the case, but he claims it.) It is explicitly not a "what if".

Ken Feder

4/23/2017 07:24:56 pm

Plato said Atlantis was real only in the sense that Critias, a character in a fictional dialogue written by Plato, says it was real.

Americanegro

4/23/2017 08:59:29 pm

Ah, T. Franke! In the most fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou sense of the question, what exactatacally is "the historical tradition from Egypt"? I await your explectercation and anticipate a lot of made up bullshit and conjuring because there is no "the historical tradition from Egypt" when it comes to Atlantis.

True is, that Plato is speaking through a dialogue, as always. So in principle, not a single statement can be attributed to Plato directly. Even not the analogy of the cave in the Republic, for example.

Yet it is true at the same time, that Plato expressed his views through his dialogues. At a certain point, the idea of not-attributing the dialogues' contents to Plato becomes cynical and implausible. In my humble opinion, the analogy of the cave is really what Plato thought.

It depends e.g., who is saying what in a dialogue. In the Timaeus-Critias, Socrates himself acknowledges the story, and with him all other philosphers present, who are - as said - philosophers in Plato's sense. Concluding from his other dialogues, we should really expect the story to be meant as true.

If the story is not true, then this is a very nasty deception. Vidal-Naquet called it "perverse". Which it could be, of course.

But in order to discuss this, such a forum is not the right place. My humble opinion is, that it is not a deception, but a distorted historical tradition. In the same way as Herodotus' information from the Saitic Egypt is often distorted.

@Americanegro:
You do not meet my level of discussion.

Americanegro

4/24/2017 04:11:30 pm

So T. Franke admits there is no "the historical tradition from Egypt" when it comes to Atlantis.

Only Me

4/23/2017 11:39:31 am

"I’ve been writing this blog for nearly seven years, and for most of that time I have produced a new post seven days per week, 365 days per year."

Plus books, the content under Articles and The Library and your job. That's a lot of words by any measure. Do what you have to do; I think you've earned some me time.

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Americanegro

4/23/2017 08:46:56 pm

I have read almost every word on this website, not including the comments because life is too short to kick against the pricks. I admire your Herculean work ethic and if you want to dial it back from 7 days a week to 5 days a week I rejoice in your slightly increased free time, not that it's any of my business!

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Joe Scales

4/23/2017 11:47:41 am

As for the resort, I was out at the mention that someone brought their kid...

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Titus pullo

4/23/2017 12:00:03 pm

And i thought this blog was ur full time gig! Your in depth research and quick turn around on say an aa or ae show was and is phenominal! 5 per week and a full time job ...we appeciate your work!

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Shane Sullivan

4/23/2017 12:55:04 pm

Heck, I'm grateful you kept it up as long as you did. I hope you enjoy having a little more free time.

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Harry

4/23/2017 04:31:10 pm

I've continued to enjoy your blog, even if I am now only a lurker, and I will continue enjoying it, no matter what schedule you keep. I appreciate all of the work you have put into it and will put into it. Enjoy your days off, or enjoy the money you make, as you please.

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peter Kirchmeir

4/23/2017 07:46:59 pm

Thanks for all the translating and the many articles.

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Clete

4/23/2017 08:24:41 pm

I, like many others to this blog, appreciate the time, effort and research you have put into this. You deserve to take some time for yourself instead of being tied to providing this on a daily basis. The fringe writers are not going away, they like bad weather, are always going to be with us as long as they feel they have an audience of misguided non-critical thinkers.

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E.P. Grondine

4/23/2017 09:33:10 pm

Hi Jason -
There are and always will be more nuts than there is you.
I am looking forward to your new works.

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orang

4/24/2017 10:23:09 am

Jason, I have always been amazed by your blog. You will like your new time off so much that you could even cut back further--you deserve it. Constantly "beating against the current" of lunatic fringe thinkers must be exhausting and discouraging at times.

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Murgatroyd

4/24/2017 10:25:58 am

The blog obviously absorbs a huge amount of time and resources, and I'm sure you needed to cut back. Let's hope that the new approach allows you more time to devote to other matters.

Fortunately, the blog archive, library and translations still remain on the website.

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At Risk

4/24/2017 11:53:35 am

Well Jason, maybe you will end up with enough time to co-author my new, upcoming book--after a very pregnant discovery is finally born...unearthed. Here's a good working title:

FEAR AND LOATHING IN MINNESOTA:
Savage Journeys to the Heart of Medieval America

I'm thinking about using the seemingly likable pen-name "Stoney Stonehole."

Well, I guess you are allowed to have a life outside of this blog. *sigh*

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Brian

4/24/2017 01:54:29 pm

Good lord, you've probably written more words than H.L. Mencken estimated he wrote. Definitely cut back. Burn out is not a requirement for personal honor.

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Scott Hamilton

4/25/2017 09:58:36 am

Thanks for all the work you've put in! You do whatever schedule makes sense to you.

If I may make a humble suggestion, I'd be really interested in some in-depth history of the Watcher myth, whether that's a series of blog posts or a book or whatever. I know you've covered the waters to death, but it's spread all over the place.

Also, I'd like more about Hermes Trismegistus. Again, you've covered the idea a lot, but I still don't have a great sense of where he came from and how he became so important.

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Americanegro

4/25/2017 11:19:12 pm

Herpes Trismejizzmis was not a real person, in the same sense that Atlantis was not an actual place. You literally cannot learn ANYTHING about him her or it.

If you want to learn about the Watchers, watch Highlander.

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Not the Comte de Saint Germain

4/26/2017 12:58:59 am

You can learn what people have believed about Hermes Trismegistus, just like any other legendary subject.

Scott Hamilton: The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus by Florian Ebeling, despite the rather sensational title, is a good description of how that legend evolved.

Americanegro

4/26/2017 03:08:11 am

Precisely! Precisely like Winnie the Pooh.

Shane Sullivan

4/27/2017 11:53:09 am

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnipeg_(bear)

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.